Search Worlds Without End

In Verity's world, nanotech plagues decimated the population after an initial renaissance of utopian nanotech cities. Growing up on an isolated farm, she finds her happy life changing course when Blaze, the only young man in the community and Verity's best friend, is shot. With Blaze's body wrapped in a nanotech cocoon, Verity sets off on a quest to the Enlivened City of Cincinnati.

It is a place of legend, where huge bio-engineered bees carry information through the streets and enormous nanotech flowers burst from the tops of strange buildings. It is the place where Blaze might be brought back from the brink of death. But Cincinnati is a city of dreams turned into nightmares, endlessly reliving the fantasies of its creator, a city that Verity must rule--or die.

The journey of Verity across the wonderfully altered landscape of mid-America began in Queen City Jazz. From a Shaker commune to the nanotech-enlivened walled city of Cincinnati, young Verity traveled to save her best friend, Blaze, and to reject her controlling destiny: to become the queen of Queen City. Now the journey continues, on down the river, in Mississippi Blues.

As the enlivened city of Cincinnati is about to be transformed, and the enslaved citizens freed, Verity causes the construction of a huge nanotech riverboat, launched so that she and Blaze can accompany the released but nano-plagued people of that city down the Mississippi River to the mysterious city of New Orleans, where a rumored salvation awaits them. On and on they travel, through a landscape altered and strange, past dead cities, drowned cities, and cities weirdly alive, always accompanied by the music of the river, possessed by jazz and the blues.

This is how it begins...

...with the Silence, born of mysterious, space-originated phenomena that render Earth's dominant technologies useless -- inspiring paranoia and alien invasion fears within secret government agencies, which, in turn, inspire repressive actions against a perceived enemy populace.

...and with murder, as New Orleans mob boss and voudoun queen, Marie Laveau, dies in a hail of gunfire -- and is remade through the wonders of nanotechnology.

In a new world that necessity has transfigured -- an exhilarating, seething stew of microscopic machinery and genetic engineering; of totalinarianism, eco-terrorism and violence -- Marie Laveau's hunger for vengance is giving way to something greater.

For Destiny has named her savior of the outcasts, the opressed, the crazies, the hunted and the Silence's mutant children, who all flock to her dream of a future as sweet as an Ellington riff...and a safe haven called Crescent City.

Once the world worked differently -- before the Silence from space quieted the airwaves and rendered electronics useless.

Once there was a haven called Crescent City, built through the wonders of nanotechnology to transport its enlightened inhabitants into the cosmos, far away from the chaos and terrors of a world gone mad. But humanity has failed the city. And carelessness has left it vulnerable to attack from those who covet the health and prosperity it offers.

One of the original pioneers -- a recipient of the DNA-altering virus affecting a remarkable few who were born at the Silence's onset-Jason Peabody must now flee in the wake of an unanticipated assault on Crescent City by pirates. In the city-imposed persona of musical six-gun-toting Radio Cowboy, entrusted with the recovery of lost technology needed to heal the sentient metropolis and rocket it upward, he embarks on a bizarre odyssey across a perilous, unrecognizable outside -- through a landscape of Western round-ups and tragically "youngening" children of plague-ravaged humans in foreboding flower cities of conscious machines, talking animals, and toys that long to be real. With him is Dania, a brilliant scientist and resilient survivor whose hidden, troubled past is now painfully remembered beyond the walls of her urban sanctuary.

But even as Dania and her Cowboy journey westward, others are being relentlessly drawn to Crescent City from all parts of the globe -- and two from the moon, the last humans remaining from the inexplicably vanished Unity colony.

For an existence that is not as it was is on the brink of yet another astonishing transformation -- either by grand design or random cosmic accident. And the appearance on Earth of strange unearthly illuminations is causing widespread fear and panic -- as pilgrims from everywhere gather in Crescent City seeking answers to the Silence's long-concealed mysteries, responding to the hypnotic light music that's calling them toward a remarkable destiny in the stars.